I have a cat. Her name is Cameo, she’s adorable, and recently she peed inside of a potted plant.
But can you imagine how amazing it would be if she could roar… while peeing inside of a potted plant?
She’d be like, “give me some treats” and then like ferocious roar... it would be so cute!
But domestic cats can’t roar. Only four species in the cat family can: lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars.
Here’s the weird thing, though: zoologists are pretty sure those four species of cats can’t purr.
So even though my cat can’t roar, the reason probably has a lot to do with the things in her throat that let her purr.
Now, we still aren’t - this is amazing - totally sure how cats purr. There’s no, like, “purr box” that we can locate in a cat, and no one’s ever stuck
a purring cat in an MRI to find out exactly what’s happening. But we’ve known for a while that it probably involves the larynx, aka the voice box.
Back in 1834, a British zoologist named Richard Owen noticed that there was an anatomical difference between the cat species that purred and the ones that roared: roaring cats had
a more flexible hyoid. The hyoid is a structure that supports the tongue and larynx.